Simon Twigger @ MCW

I’ve been experimenting with the Dashboard, part of Apple’s latest OS X release. I’m often firing up safari to run searches on the Rat Genome Database, one of our major projects here, so that seemed like a good target for my first dashboard widget.

The widget is quite simple in its current incarnation. It allows you to enter search terms and then run a search on RGD, either over the whole database, or for specific objects such as Genes, QTLs, ontologies, etc. You select the scope of the search, enter your term or phrase and hit enter and the results appear in a new safari window. I went with a grayscale theme, if I can get access to the original artwork that we have on the site header with the double helix and the white rat, that would all it to be more colorful. Rather than try and match colors and blends I took the easy way out and went black and white. Here are a few screenshots:

The main screen, drop down menu and search field:

The backside of the widget - spooky rat!

Here’s a quicktime movie of it in use:

if you are interested in giving it a try, you can download the widget as a .zip file: RGD.wdgt.zip

Apple requests that the following blurb be available on a widget’s download page so here it is:

Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger is required. If you’re using Safari, click the download link. When the widget download is complete, show Dashboard, click the Plus sign to display the Widget Bar and click the widget’s icon in the Widget Bar to open it. If you’re using a browser other than Safari, click the download link. When the widget download is complete, unarchive it and place it in /Library/Widgets/ in your home folder. show Dashboard, click the Plus sign to display the Widget Bar and click the widget’s icon in the Widget Bar to open it.

If you give the widget a try, let me know how you get on! If you are stuck for things to look for here are a few sample searches you can try:

Gene: A2m
Whole Database: Hypertension
QTL: Hypertension
Disease Ontology: Hypertension
References: Rapp

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